This site is being developed to provide current and useful information
and educational materials for Jupiter, Uranus,
and Neptune. These three gas giants presently do not have dedicated
observational spacecraft.

What about Saturn?

Cassini is currently
in the midst of a two year extended Equinox Mission to explore the Saturn system
having just completed its initial four-year mission. Cassini has been approved a
mission plan for a seven year extended-extended mission (XXM) - also known as the
Solstice Mission - that would continue explorations of the Saturn system until 2017.

First planet to be predicted to exist by Urbain Leverrier and John Adams and then
discovered following a search by Johan Galle in 1845, Neptune was the last solar
system target for Voyager 2 which came to within 5,000 km above its clouds on 24
August 1989.

First visited in 1973 by Pioneer 10, an unmanned spacecraft, the giant planet's
first close-up images were captured using the spin-scan imaging technique originally
developed by V. Suomi and R. Parent in 1967 to image the Earth from ATS-I satellite
. Pioneer 10 was followed by its twin, Pioneer 11 which also went on to visit Saturn
in 1978. The Pioneers were soon followed by Voyagers 1 and 2, both part of the Mariner
Jupiter Saturn (MJS) program. Voyager 2 was later targeted to visit Uranus in 1986
and then Neptune in 1989.

The first dedicated spacecraft to observe Jupiter was the Galileo
Orbiter. The Galileo mission also deployed a probe to enter the atmosphere, the
first and the only instrumented probe so far to explore a giant planet's atmosphere.